Beans

Two springs ago a friend gave me a handful of black beans and for the past two years, I planted a few and marveled at the vines taking over half the garden, wrapping around the stakes I hastily set up, nearly too late because the beans were already threatening to twine around the tomato plants and topple the peppers. 

Stand out there for two minutes—I’m not lying—and a tendril will sway and dip and reach for your arm. You can watch it in real time, capturing, looping your wrist. 

But would that be such a bad way to go, bound to the garden, your body muffled by a bean plant? These are the weird things I think about in the middle of the night, a new medication interrupting my sleep, so I am wide awake at one, at two, at three, blinking in the dark, the dog curled against my feet, every now and then, shuddering through a nightmare until I nudge her out of it. 

Why do I assume it’s a nightmare? Maybe she’s battling the mailman and winning. What is that poem that says the world is fifty percent terrible, but let’s not forget the other fifty percent? (I’m paraphrasing.) I want to believe it, but here I am, cataloguing the terrible. 

For example, a friend’s son who was adopted as a baby from another country, and now he’s grown up and afraid of being snatched by ICE and won’t leave home without his identification papers. And how did I get so lucky, never once thinking about what papers to bring with me when I step out of my house. 

Stop reading the news, my husband says. This isn’t the news, I tell him. This is me, talking to a friend. What if the poem is wrong and the world is way more than fifty percent terrible? 

I forgot to tell you something about the bean plants, how all of the tendrils have lovely purple flowers and each pod starts green, turns purple, turns brown, until it is paper-thin, the crackle when you run your thumbnail along the edge, the splitting apart, the reveal: 

Five shiny black beans, 

each specked with a white dot, as if some kind person carefully lifted them, one by one, and dabbed them with paint. Why have I never noticed this before and what does it mean? Nothing. Everything. If fifty-fifty is all we get, please help me remember this. 

Tipping Point

Yesterday at the farmers’ market my husband and I had a dumb argument about blueberries. He said he didn’t want to buy them anymore. They’re too expensive. 

I said, Everything is more expensive at the farmers’ market. At that moment we were in line to buy a block of seven-dollar cheese, and we’d just paid twelve dollars for a bag of coffee. But don’t we want to support local businesses? I said. Don’t we want to eat organic? 

Well, yeah, he said. But this is crazy. He was hurt because he thought I was judging him. I was hurt because I thought he was judging me. 

We went to the grocery store, and he bought cheaper blueberries (which were probably picked months ago and trucked over from Canada. I’m kinda judging. I admit this. I’m kinda judging!), but I kept my mouth shut. I was suddenly remembering the time I had a nervous breakdown about pepperoni pizza. 

It was a million years ago on a school night and one of the kids had just sprung that they needed some expensive must-have thing for school the next day, and my husband was driving around trying to find it, and it ended up being even more expensive than we’d imagined, and on the way home he called and said he was picking up pepperoni pizza, and I lost my mind and started screaming at him. 

Every once in a while, we still joke about this, how I could handle the pricey school thing, but the two for twenty-buck pepperoni pizza special put me over the edge. We all have our tipping points. 

The day went on and it was too hot outside to walk for very long and some animal is taking bites out of the tomatoes and a small bag of chocolate chips at the grocery store costs six dollars and Ohio is sending the National Guard to DC to help the president scare people, and at the restaurant where a friend is a chef, one of the workers was crying because she was afraid of being arrested by ICE, and he told her, Don’t worry, we know how to protect you if it comes to that. 

What does that mean? we asked him. Hide the lady in the walk-in freezer?

Well, yeah, he said. Because ICE can’t go into private spaces.

But what’s to stop them? I said. I was imagining all of our families at the library, the people from Somalia and Pakistan and Albania and India and China and Mexico and how I don’t have a clue what their immigration status is, 

but I do know that the little girl loves Dog Man books and the little boy likes to make pretend toast in the pretend toaster and carry it over to me to pretend-taste, and what are the private spaces in the library where we can hide these children if it comes to that? And now I understand why it’s so much easier and more comfortable—and Jesus, the privilege, the over-the-top, absurd amount of privilege I have—

to get snippy about blueberries and pepperoni pizza and animal teeth marks on my tomatoes. But what am I going to do about it. 

What are any of us going to do. 

 

Afternoon Protest

The protest is at the end of our street, so my husband and I walk down and join the group. The group is eight miles of people stretching from the northern suburbs and down to the Statehouse downtown. Our neighbors brought an extra sign they made. Mine says, No Kings Since 1776. On the back it says Columbus Arborfest, which is a big festival coming up in two weeks at our neighborhood park.

Cars go by honking in solidarity at our signs. The signs are the usual. All are Welcome and No Human is Illegal and the word Fascism with an X over it and something about the president and tacos, which I don’t understand until my husband explains it to me. A helicopter flies overhead and circles back around and flies by again, and we all raise our signs, and I have the funny thought: 

What if I turn mine the other way, so it promotes the tree festival, and what if everyone standing in our eight-mile line has some kind of fun community event on the back of their signs too, and what if we are in an alternate reality, and instead of being despondent about the state of the country and having to protest against injustice and corruption and the dismantling of social services, we all wave signs about art festivals and upcoming concerts and the Columbus Zoo? 

More cars honk. People wave at us out their windows. We’re standing in front of the firehouse and a firefighter sets up a lawn chair and sits behind us, smiling like he’s watching a parade. The protest is scheduled from 2 pm to 3:30. Halfway through we’re all supposed to drop our signs, hold hands, and link our eight-mile chain together (except for going across intersections and the driveway in front of the firehouse.) 

We all do that for a few minutes. I’m thinking about the first time I went to a protest to call attention to cuts to school programming and I got thrown out of a government building and later, gave a speech through a bullhorn about how a librarian saved my life.  

And the last protest I went to, a few weeks ago, which was a rally for public library funding and protecting the freedom to read, where I met up with some of my co-workers in our library union, and one of my librarian friends held her little girl who held a little sign which said Let the Kids Read. 

And the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic where we all wore masks and stood six feet apart and some nice guy went across the street to the Kroger and bought a bunch of bottled water and piled it in a wagon and rolled it up and down the sidewalk offering it to everyone. 

And the Women’s March in DC in 2017 when the massive crowd lifted me off my feet and I waved my stop sign, which had one word on it, NO, and I shouted along with everyone else, "This is what democracy looks like!" and felt chills for a moment, my heart banging in my chest, my eyes burning with tears, because this IS what democracy looks like. 

Okay. It didn’t totally work. 

The state cut many of the school librarians, and the library funding and freedom to read in Ohio are still up in the air, and we all know how the other things turned out. So, I don’t know why, really, I’m parked out here in ninety billion degree weather, burning the backs of my legs off because I forgot to apply sunscreen. 

Cars keep driving by, honking, some of the honks continuing past us down the street and new honks joining those, until all you can hear is one long, blaring whir of honk-sound, and I remember

back in DC when the crowd lifted me off my feet and I looked up at the sky and saw that my NO signed had flipped upside down and said ON, and who knows how long I’d been waving it around like that, and I fixed it, but I couldn’t stop grinning like a fool, all of these beautiful people and their funny and clever and defiant signs, and I was one of them. 

I am one of them. 

Making Peace in the Garden

Because what else can you do but make peace with it? Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cursing out the beans that twined themselves around the tomato plants and tried to strangle them, and the two cucumber plants that took over the other half of the garden, shooting out so many cucumbers you ran out of pickle jars to cram them in. 

Meanwhile, all the flower seeds you planted and so carefully nurtured for weeks, the bright pink zinnias, the marigolds and the sweet purple basil, came to nothing but a handful of raggedy sprouts. Which makes no sense, when over there, in the sidewalk crack, some bird’s dropped a seed, and wah lah, up came a five-foot high Dr. Suess flower. 

Two decades of gardening, and I still don’t understand how it works. But then, I don’t understand much these days. Everyone I know is walking around shellshocked, each hour’s news a fresh horror. Why is this happening? we say to each other. 

But we may as well be yelling at the dirt, the sun, the weirdo bug that lays its eggs on the base of the strawberry plant and sucks the whole thing dry. 

Do something, a friend urges me when I confess my despair to her. But that’s the problem, I say. Everything I do feels pointless. 

She tells me to ask myself three questions: What brings me joy? What am I good at? How can I help? 

The place where all three overlap is supposedly the “sweet spot for action.” 

I like this, but I don’t think it works in my case. What brings me joy, what I’m good at, is writing. But what good does writing do? Especially now, when any two-bit AI can spit out words on gardening and hopelessness in less than thirty seconds, (another cause of despair!) while here I am, squinting at my computer screen, two hours into it, and still not sure how to tie it all together.

Okay. It has something to do with letting go. 

Forget what the plan was (I wanted more than three tomatoes! I didn’t want ten thousand cucumbers!) and accept what I have been given. Beans. Multiple jars of pickles. 

Or, it’s about making peace with what I can’t control, in general. But that's the easy response. 

Yesterday, I spent the day in the garden, picking cucumbers, untwining bean tendrils from the tomatoes, flicking bugs off the strawberries. And then I watered the raggedy flower sprouts and set them more fully in the sun. 

I am not ready to give up on them yet. 

Alarmed

Friday, we had a bubble party at the library, but first the police came because I accidentally tripped the alarm. I was the first one in that morning and frozen for a moment in the dark, the motion detector lights flicking on one by one, the alarm panel counting down, waiting for me to dismantle it, but I didn’t know how to dismantle it. I don’t have the code. 

Which was funny/not funny because just the other day, a coworker asked me if I wanted the code and I said no. Why would I need the code? I am never the first person there. Cut To: me in the empty vestibule, the alarm blaring. It all turned out fine. My manager disabled the alarm remotely, and when the police guy showed up, he was nice about it, taking my name and writing up his report, 

and all the while I was thinking: he has a gun, which is a thing I always think about when I am interacting with a police officer, not that I have interacted with them that much. Once, a million years ago, one of my husband’s old high school friends, who was a cop, visited our apartment and set his gun down on our coffee table and I couldn’t stop looking at it. 

There’s a gun on our coffee table is what thought over and over in my head and how was I supposed to think about anything else? The next day it was still bugging me, how I had tripped the alarm and got written up in a police guy’s report. I could imagine what the report said. Ding dong old white lady didn’t know the code. My husband and I were driving to the petfood store and had stopped at a light only a few blocks from where we live. 

An unhoused man was asleep on the sidewalk, his back against the bank building. The traffic light stayed red forever, and it was so hot outside. One hundred it said on our dashboard when we first turned on the car, the kind of heat where you can see it shimmering up from the sidewalk. The guy was wearing heavy clothes, pants and a long-sleeved shirt, a jacket. He had a white beard. He was probably the same age as me and my husband. 

The light turned green, and we drove past, and I saw that someone had set a water bottle next to the sleeping man, and I almost started crying. I almost start crying a lot lately, but I can usually reel it back in. I wish there was a code for this, a way to disarm all of the alarms going off. But there isn’t. It’s just us, and oh my God, the least we can do is offer a water bottle. I’m sorry. 

I start off these posts with the best of intentions. Keep it joyful. Look on the bright side. And yet I keep going bleak. A good two hundred people came to the bubble party. They crowded into the youth department because it was way too hot outside to blow bubbles. 

The librarian poured bubble liquid onto trays and handed out wands. For a few hours the room was loud with shrieks and laughing, bubbles floating, popping.  

Floating

I am floating in a swimming pool on a pink flamingo. When I lean back, the sky is a bright blue splotch, the sun peeking out behind the trees. I haven’t been in a swimming pool in years. It feels good. The cool water, the sun on my face. I could do this all day.

I could do this all day, I say to my friends. It’s their pool. Their pink flamingo plastic floaty-thingy. Tonight they're hosting a party for their daughter who is getting married. My husband and I are in town to celebrate. Our son has flown in too. It’s a quick out and back trip. We’ll be here for less than 48 hours. I look up at the sky again, trying not to skip myself forward, the pool time over, the cleaning up and readying for the party, the party ending, the goodbyes, the trip back to the airport.  

How do I do that, float myself in place? The pink flamingo bobbing, friends and my husband and son throwing a ball overhead, someone handing me a coke to fit into a drink holder. There’s a drink holder in the pink flamingo floaty thingy’s arm! Who thought of this? I want to hug this person.  

Let’s swim across the pool, my husband says. See if we can hold our breath. 

Another thing I haven’t done in years. Dunk my head underwater. Swim. I do it. It’s funny how what you’ve learned comes back to you. I can hold my breath. I can swim. What else do I know that I have forgotten? I dip under again. The world is far away and it’s such a relief. 

But I have to stop doing this. Being bothered by the world. Except bother isn’t the right word. Rage is what I mean. Despair. Whatever the word is that means sink underwater and stay there until everything above the surface rights itself. Here though, now, the world is all right. I come up for air.  Pool time is over and now we are at the party. 

It’s English garden-themed because the engaged couple live in England. The invitation said to wear a hat. My friend lends me a silly green hat with a poofy bow. I sip a minty drink and my son tries to teach me how to do a swingy dance. I can’t get the hang out of it, my feet tripping me up and my hat bow boinking my face, but I am laughing. And look at the engaged couple, how radiant they are. I want to stop time. The party has ended. We say our goodbyes. 

Back at the airport and I am writing this. I am writing this and I am on a plane. I am home, writing this. I am floating on a pink flamingo in a swimming pool. I am dancing, feet tripping, laughing. Over and over I tip my head back, blinking at the bright blue sky. 

Acceptance (or not)

All week I was fighting a grouchy mood. First, it was the heat and how every time you went outside it was like slogging through a steam bath. And then, out of the blue, my back started hurting, and all the plans I had went out the window, and I ended up lazing on the couch and watching TV and reading a book about Buddhist philosophy, which said stuff like

“Struggling with anything to make it be other than what it is creates suffering.” 

which hit me hard because lately I’ve realized that a key part of my personality is Wanting to Make Things Be Other Than What They Are. 

For example, we have fancy new book shelves at our newly renovated library and I don’t like them. They’re metal and the books slide and fall over and so we have these hook-like contraption things that attach at the back of the shelves to prop the books up, but the problem is it’s hard to maneuver the hook-like contraptions, which might not seem like a big deal, but a substantial part of working at a library is shelving books, and therefore, having to CONSTANTLY MESS AROUND WITH THE HOOK-LIKE CONTRAPTIONS. 

I don’t like this, I tell my manager, and she nods and smiles and tries to make me feel better by agreeing that yes, it is annoying, but hey, it’s here to stay, so what are we going to do? 

(I don’t know CHANGE IT TO A THING THAT WORKS BETTER?!?!) 

But look, I say, it takes longer to shelve now. 

Nod and shrug. 

But listen, I say, did anyone ask us if we wanted these newfangled, hard-to-use bookends? 

Smile and shrug. 

Okay, now I realize that I am getting on my manager’s nerves, so I shut up, but inside, I’m thinking: Why can't we change this thing that doesn’t work? 

But I don’t say this. I finish up with the $&%^# shelving and head downstairs to my new desk in the youth department, which is smaller than the old desk and three-fourths of the way enclosed so that it is comically cage-like, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t blown all of my goodwill complaining about the shelving. 

What is it like, I wonder, as I turn slowly around inside my cage-desk, to be the kind of person 

who accepts things the way things are? 

the kind of person who steps out into the steam bath and smiles, who nonchalantly notices back pain and finds humor in library renovations, who shakes her head and sighs unquestioningly at the outrageous and horrifying news of the world?    

The Buddhist philosophy book has no answers except Don’t be the kind of person that, apparently, I am. Which suddenly makes me think, Wait, shouldn’t I, therefore, accept that THIS is who I am? And wouldn’t it be a type of suffering, too, to wish that I could be a different person?

These questions make my head spin, and spin some more, as I keep turning inside my cage-desk as the patrons spill into the room, the moms and nannies with the baby strollers and the toddlers toddling toward the train table, the school age kids with their summer reading forms and the teenage volunteers. 

For the next few hours, I am too busy to whine or worry or question or complain because someone wants help finding a book and someone asks for a sticker and someone has bumped his head and needs the Mr. Smiley Face ice pack and someone has piddled in the baby garden. 

There is a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is. Accept the things you cannot change. Or don’t. Be the kind of person you are. Or not. In the meantime, find the book and hand out the stickers, soothe the bonked head and clean up all the piddle.